Artist David Hockney, 77, has told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he is working harder than ever from his home in Los Angeles.
Speaking to broadcaster James Naughtie, Bradford-born Hockney said he spends more time painting now as his deafness has curtailed his social life.
“I work as hard, even harder now,” he said. “I just work all the time. I don’t go out from here – I’m too deaf.
“I don’t really have much of a social life and I don’t really mind much.”
Hockney said he is “perfectly happy”, despite leaving his home rarely. “I go out to the dentist, the doctor’s, the bookshop and the marijuana store,” he went on. “But that’s it.”
The artist said he now avoids parties as he cannot hear properly when there are more than one or two people in a room.
Yet he said he was “discovering things all the time still” and defends his adopted home city in California, to which he moved in the 1960s.
“The light is 10 times brighter,” he can be heard saying in an interview broadcast on Thursday. “I remember one or two people saying to me, ‘Why have you come here to this cultural backwater?’
“Well, some of the great works of art of the 20th Century have been made here. City Lights, Some Like It Hot. Hollywood then was still big.”
The artist recently opened up his personal archive for the first time for a feature-length BBC Two documentary that will be shown in cinemas from 25 November.
Hockney is directed by Randall Wright, who previously made the acclaimed documentary Lucian Freud: A Painted Life.
James Naughtie, Today programme presenter, on David Hockney’s house
…read more
Source:: BBC Entertainment
